Search Engine Optimization Basics

Why do SEO? Search engine optimization is to get the search engine to favor your website for your keywords so it appears at the highest possible order, i.e. on the first page of the search result. There are many things a website owner must do to optimize his/her website.

The aim of search engine optimization is to get the search engine to favor your website for your keywords so it appears at the highest possible order, i.e. on the first page of the search result. There are many things a website owner must do to optimize his/her website.

To bring more visitors to your web site, be sure to optimize your site so the search engines can find it easily. Here are some simple ways to optimize your website:

Submit to Search EnginesWhen you create a new website, the first thing is to get the search engines to crawl to your website and index your website content. Submit your site to major search engines through a submission service.

Use SynonymsWhen setting up your site for SEO in English, make use of synonyms for your target keywords. Search engines in English are generally smart enough to recognize synonyms and will place more weight on your page if you have more instances of related keywords, while you avoid the detracting effect of stuffing the same keyword. Use Google keyword tool to find related keywords.

Use Meta TagsUse popular keywords and tags in your site's title, meta description and meta keywords tags. Search engines give weight to these tags, so include the best, most powerful phrases and keywords in it. Although meta tags are not visible to the visitors, they are meant to be read by the search engines to determine its relevancy to the user's search words. The meta tags are good places to pack your best keywords.

Internal Cross LinkingAlways make sure the individual pages making up your site link to themselves as well as to your main webpage. By having more pages which link between themselves, more traffic will be received by each individual page. This is one of the most basic ways to optimize and grow the traffic you already receive to your site. Include a sitemap page. If you are using Wordpress, there is a plugin for Google XML Sitemap.

Write for Human BeingsWith the Google Panda effect, whereby Google changes its ranking algorithm, do not bet all your effort on SEO alone. Create content not only for the software (spiders) but also to attract human eyeballs. Write great content for Internet marketing. If the quality is there, then results are sure to follow. You have to give a person a reason to want to keep revisiting your site, and as they continue to come back so will your Internet revenues. You will also see those people will begin to share your site with others.

Keep the Visitors LongerThe longer the users stay on your website, the better your ranking. A trick to keep them longer is to embed video on your website so they will spend more time watching it. Include some social media icons to enable them to share it with their friends on Facebook.

Add New ContentAdd fresh content to your website in a consistent manner. Fresh content will continue to attract your readers to keep coming back for more. It will also attract the search engine bots. If you do not add new content, your visitors will stop coming and you will lose them forever.

Regular MaintenanceSEO is not a one-time thing, so you always need to maintain your blog or website regularly. Check constantly for broken links, images that will not load, and videos that have been removed from the host source and other broken paths on your pages. Search engines penalize sites displaying broken links, so stay diligent here.

As you can see, search engine optimization is not rocket science. Anyone can do it successfully.